Professor Anthony Glees Dr Julian Richards University of ... - PCG

articulation of government policy in this area and a great deal of information forpeople subject to the vetting process.The policy statement had made it very clear that recruitment controls were thefirst step in all of this and that one of the most important things in terms ofpersonnel security was to undertake checks on identity, the right to work,employment history and so on and to ensure the basics were right beforeanything else was done. It had made it clear that vetting had to be carried out ina proportionate way which permitted a strong national security case to be madein order that the checks might be carried out, for example by using the SecurityService record in order to be able to check against the full criminal record on thepolice national computer and so on.In the particular context of today, the statement had also made clear hownational security vetting should affect people in the contracting community. Thegovernment had held what it described as useful discussions with PCG which hadallowed it to emphasise the point that apart from in a handful of quiteexceptional circumstances, no one should be expected to have a pre-existingsecurity clearance in order to apply for work on a sensitive contract or aparticular government post. This was the first time this explicit reference to thataspect of the policy in the Prime Minister‟s statement had been publicly made.This statement was, of course, not a „silver bullet‟. Difficulties with the contractorcommunity would remain but it had been made clear to different departmentsand private contractors that this was the government‟s approach. Iforganisations persisted in stating to potential contractors that they must have anexisting security clearance in order to apply for a job with a List „X‟ organisation,or to tender for a particular contract, then that might be to leave the door opento indirect discrimination. It was with this end in mind that the government hadcommunicated a dedicated email address to PCG in order that it may beinformed about instances of particularly bad practice in this area. It was notpossible to follow up every instance forwarded to government of individualcontractors who may have believed they had been excluded from opportunitiesbecause of the vetting regime. However, the government would regularly check36